Busman’s Holiday

Muphry’s law: “If you write anything criticising editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written.” (Guardian Style Guide)

“How to Not Write Bad,” by Ben Yagoda, is the latest in a series of books about writing and editing that have crossed my desk in the past year, including “Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch,” by Constance Hale; “Several Short Sentences About Writing,” by Verlyn Klinkenborg; and “Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction,” by Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd. Usually I read these things at the beach, but I happened to have the Yagoda with me while waiting for a bus in Brooklyn one cold Saturday morning. (I was on my way to Rockaway to see if I was eligible for Rapid Repairs on my Sandy-flooded bungalow. I am not.)

I had just missed the stupid bus, and was standing under a sign that read “No Standing.” I knew it was directed at motorists, not at pedestrians, and that in this context “standing” means “sitting,” as in sitting in your car at the bus stop, but I was feeling snarly. Under the circumstances, I didn’t think Mr. Yagoda would mind if, instead of starting at the beginning of his book, I plunged right in, to see if there was anything fun in the middle. I opened to a section headed “Eggcorns.” What the hell is an eggcorn? For some reason, the “corns” my mother used to get on her toes were the first thing I thought of, and crossing a corn with an egg, even if it was only a quail egg, gave me a picture of someone who had a lot of trouble buying shoes.

“Eggcorn” is supposed to evoke “acorn.” Yagoda explains, “In 2003, linguist Geoffrey Pullum coined the term eggcorn to refer to common homophone or near-homophone mistakes in which the mistake makes a kind of sense. Eggcorn itself has a certain logic, for example, because acorns are roughly the shape of eggs.” He cites the Eggcorn Database, and if I were a student of Mr. Yagoda’s (he teaches in the journalism school at the University of Delaware, and has written on commas for the Times) this “golden age of eggcorns” would be enough to occupy me for the rest of the semester. When I got home that night, the eggcorn led to the mondegreen, which is right up there with the spoonerism, and I forgot that the professor was making a point: spell-check does not catch homophones. (A mondegreen is a term for a misheard lyric, coined in 1954 by Sylvia Wright, a Scottish writer, who always thought the ballad that goes “They hae slain the Earl o’ Moray and laid him on the green” went “They hae slain the Earl o’ Moray and Lady Mondegreen.”)

In addition to enjoying the company of a fellow language nerd on the bus (which finally came), I found much to be grateful for in the Yagoda. I learned the term “epicene pronoun,” meaning the genderless plural “they” or “their” when its antecedent calls for the singular (and gendered) “he or she” or “his or hers.” Merciless copy editors pounce on this, and there is no easy fix for it. (In this week’s TV column, Emily Nussbaum writes, quite properly, “She wants to be peaceful, brave, and decent, but her needy personality makes everyone she meets want to claw off his or her face.”) Yagoda holds the line on “impact” (not a verb), explains why the serial comma is also known as “the Oxford comma” (it’s the press, not the university), discourages the use of bold face (bravo!), and, in what he labels “An Incredibly Geeky Point,” shares his elegant three-step method for tricking the computer into giving you an apostrophe, or single “close” quote, when it wants to use a single “open” quote, as in ’60. He simply types another apostrophe after the incorrect one, which automatically faces in the right direction, and then goes back and deletes the wrong-facing one. My method was incredibly elaborate—it took seven steps, if I didn’t mess one of them up—and I have since adopted the Yagoda maneuver.

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